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How This Came To Be…

…is a rather intricate story. It is a dark story. It is a starlit story; I had it all. From utter despair to glimpses of bliss, I have learned to acquire the tools I need to deal with the recurrent traumas of life.

Yes, I believe that nearly all of us suffer from a form of Post Traumatic Stress. While some of us medicate and others find alternative methods of dealing with the challenges life presents us by working hard, focusing on our careers, or fully committing to our families, we tend to forget to tend to ourselves in a kind, loving, and holistically healing way.

Personally, I noticed one summer two years before graduating with my Ph.D. that I needed and wanted just some time for myself that was more introspective and respectful of my real needs than merely relaxing in front of the TV for a week – so I went to a MerKaBa Meditation workshop. There, after two long days, I finally began reconnecting with my inner self – the currently prevailing hurt, resentment, and sadness and, eventually, the joy of letting some of it go. The gamut of emotions I went through, and continued to go through during my ongoing practice of the meditation, is too long to reiterate but it certainly was not always fun to make the nightly decision of whether I wanted to sit and cry for 20 minutes that day or rather skip the meditation. Although the meditation usually resulted in a state of peacefulness, often the process of getting there was painful, albeit healing. Eventually, however, it helped break loose a lot of layers of pain that had hidden my core for nearly fifteen years.

Fifteen years is a long time. Although I had accomplished a lot during that time, I had felt incomplete and much too susceptible to unpleasant emotions being triggered, some of which I did not even consciously recognize. I would just get mad, for example, not knowing the situation hit me in a place of insecurity… Nevertheless, I was happy at one point last year. Despite my fear of unemployment and losing my lover, I had miraculously manifested two part-time positions and another chance at love – until the day in September when it all fell apart. My drop from cloud seven was severe, and I hardly remember how I survived the rest of the year other than that I worked and wrote a lot to survive because calling my friends every day was not a feasible permanent solution. Then winter came, and what I thought was hell got worse.

Without going into details, my dark shadows, so nicely kept at bay with busyness, caught up with me. Utterly engulfed with no way out, all I could do was cling to the tools I had acquired over the years, my meditation, EFT, etc., but even that I did not do it for me at times and I sat in utter despair. Yet something told me to continue my search for healing, and with the help of my tool-set and several kind people I came to one important conclusion about my life after another. Yet, the most important one was that I have to allow my emotions, all emotions, to surface, be acknowledged, and be released for healing to occur.

What a revelation that was! Whether it was theories of the Law of Attraction, Positive Thinking, or whatever, I always understood that having unwanted, unproductive emotions would hinder me and I should not feel them. However, I had no idea how not to, as I was too hurt and vulnerable, and they were a natural protective measure, albeit an ultimately disabling one. Finally, it occurred to me that the only way I will heal is by applying what I call an internal approach; instead of trying to brainwash my own mind into thinking positive thoughts that did not resonate with how I truly felt and thereby failing due to my deeply ingrained sense of integrity, I sought opportunities to heal my soul. I began to notice that when a certain aspect was healed, for instance resentment over a broken friendship, that I did no longer feel the need to think “negative” thoughts about that situation. In other words, with my approach I stay in my integrity while still changing the way I think or perceive the world.

Talking to people I realize that there are many others like me who do not do well with the external approaches of changing mental processes when their emotions simply do not line up with what they are “telling themselves.” While positive mantras can and do assist the change of mental processes, I believe that many of us who attempt to live in spiritual integrity find a solely external/mental approach unfeasible and therefore frustrating. In order to align the mental/external and the emotional/internal aspects it is necessary to recognize the blocks to those external/mental approaches, which are all related to emotions. Then, those emotions need to be acknowledged and released, so that healing from inside can occur and allow for a stronger core that really feels the truth that the external/mental changes of perceptions can be truly helpful and can continue the healing.